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No, I haven’t insulted an entire continent on my social media feed, but the sacking of Justine Sacco has caused me to look closely at myself. And you know what? I’ve said some very ignorant, insensitive, and just plain stupid things in my life and career. I am not sharing these personal examples for the purpose of self-humiliation (although I am sure I will accomplish that too), but to pose four questions:

If Ms. Sacco deserves to have her career destroyed permanently for an ill-judged tweet, what about the rest of us who’ve also had moments of spectacular idiocy?

Can a person be judged by a single error, or even by the sum total of all their past errors?

Isn’t it possible that these errors can cause people to change and grow? Are we allowing room for that to happen when we rush to judgment and summarily dismiss someone from the ranks of decent human beings?

Is it possible that by writing Justine Sacco off, we’re also writing off a portion of our own decency, by creating an environment of extreme fear in which no mistakes are tolerated, no apologies are accepted, and zero forgiveness is extended?

Ignorant things I’ve said.

Back when I owned a day spa, one of my employees tried to tell me that naming the facial services in Italian was not a good idea. Neither the staff nor the clients could pronounce “Fontana della Giovinezza” (Fountain of Youth) and after all, the spa was in California, not Tuscany, so shouldn’t I write my menu in English?

Instead of rewarding her for listening to the voice of the customer, I got defensive and angry. I told her that she and anyone else who couldn’t pronounce Italian was just plain “uneducated.” Yes, I really did belittle her, my whole staff, and practically my entire clientele. To be perfectly candid, I can’t pronounce Italian properly either, but hypocrisy goes hand-in-hand with ignorance. Four months later, she quit. I had harmed my business by driving away a valuable team member with my own ignorance and insecurity.

Insensitive things I’ve said.

On the first day of my summer internship in Exxon’s Treasury department in 1997, the senior finance executives took all of us new interns out to lunch. While eating, I knocked over a large glass of iced tea and it quickly flooded the table. No harm, no foul…except for the fact that I followed it up with, “Oh no! I did a Valdez!” And then I started to laugh, thinking others would follow suit. They didn’t.

There followed a long, shocked silence that engulfed the table as twenty people stared at me in wide-eyed disbelief. Finally, the Assistant Treasurer coughed and said, “We don’t joke about that around here, Maryling.” And then haltingly, awkwardly, the conversation began to pick back up around me, while I spent the rest of the lunch stewing in my own mortification.

You might be thinking, “Big deal, you offended a bunch of oil industry executives. So what?” It’s still an example of me not knowing what everyone else knew – that the Valdez incident could not be joked about with my audience, even eight years after the fact. Thankfully, my insensitivity did not end up hurting me – Exxon still offered me a full-time job after the summer was over. Apparently, they forgave me.

“Just plain stupid” things I’ve said.

This next story will make my Disney princess marketing machine article look hypocritical. You see, once upon a time, in early 1998, I interviewed for a marketing position at Disney. I had just completed a final round interview with a VP, and was feeling super-good about it as we said goodbye. He reached out to shake my hand and asked in parting, “By the way, what’s your favorite Disney movie?”

Uh oh. I blanked. I said the first movie I could think of, which was the last animated movie I had seen. Which was, “Anastasia.” Big mistake.

He knitted his eyebrows for a second and said, “Actually, Anastasia is from 20th Century FoxFox. We re-released Flubber that same weekend to try and clobber it.”

There are no non-four-letter words that can adequately convey how I felt in that moment. I was just plain stupid for not having done my research before a job interview. I didn’t deserve to get that job. And in the end, I didn’t get it.

The point is…

I’ve said things I massively wish I could un-say. I was ignorant, I was insensitive, I was just plain stupid. And those things cost me. But I have been able to learn and integrate lessons from all those mistakes and become a better and wiser person. My career continued on, largely because people accepted the fact that I screwed up, forgave me, and allowed me to grow and change.

I’m sure Ms. Sacco also massively regrets what she said. Her tweet was ignorant, insensitive, and just plain stupid. Let me be clear: I am not defending Justine Sacco or her comments, which I think reveal a deeply embedded ethnocentrism that is shocking in this day and age. What I am defending is the possibility that people can grow and change and learn. I hope the world will be forgiving and big-hearted enough to allow Ms. Sacco – and the rest of us who suffer from occasional idiocy – to do just that.

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I agree that it’s sad and often unfair when people lose their careers over mistakes they’ve made and might learn from. On the other hand, the examples you gave including being critical of people with less education and making an insensitive joke out of a terrible disaster are things many of us learn not to voice during childhood. By the time we’re old enough to hold a job shouldn’t we be aware that not everyone has access to higher education, and that cracking jokes about disasters shows a lack of sensitivity and judgment? This all leaves me wondering whether compassion is instinctive or whether it truly is a learned attribute.

I think you make a very valid point. My own opinion is that compassion is learned. When I was a child, I certainly didn’t want to share toys with other kids, or donate them to those less fortunate. Compassion was something I learned growing up, from accumulating more and more experiences that brought me into contact with more and more people.

Re: my inappropriate Valdez comment, I definitely should have known better than to crack that joke, but somehow I didn’t. I genuinely thought the others would laugh. I’ve often thought that I was missing some kind of a “gene” or inborn trait that most people have – that grants them the innate ability to know when something is inappropriate.

Re: my ignorant comment to my former employee about being “uneducated”…that is more complicated. I had written the entire spa menu and was proud of it, and when she told me our customers didn’t like it, I took it personally. Looking back on that incident, I remember wanting to be hurtful and wanting to lash out because I felt “harmed.” It was a total reflection of my own insecurities about myself, and had nothing to do with her or anyone else. Obviously, what I said to her was just ridiculously ignorant – not being able to pronounce words in Italian when you live in the U.S. is not a sign of being “uneducated” at all. It was a sign of my own pride, arrogance, and lack of wisdom … which all made me sound un-compassionate and which all made me a bad manager. I definitely should have done better. I should have taken her feedback – which she was just passing along on behalf of paying customers – with more grace. It fills me with shame to even relate this story – but I do so to make the point that people CAN change and that we may not want to write each other off so fast because of a point-in-time comment (even if spectacularly, flagrantly ignorant and wrong-headed).

>I’ve often thought that I was missing some kind of a “gene” or inborn trait that most people have – that grants them the innate ability to know when something is inappropriate.

Look up Aspergers Syndrome for one example of that possibility. But like everyone else, people with Aspergers have the possibility to learn and grow, without losing what makes them special and unique. Some people claim a disproportionate percentage of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs have Aspergers. I wouldn’t be surprised.

Sure, we’ve all said things we shouldn’t have said… while you make great points your mistakes are not of the magnitude of Ms. Sacco. She was the head of PR so it is her job to police others as well as herself for those types of mistakes. He twitter feed was riddled with other senseless tweets and she even joked about whether she could be fired for things she said while drunk. Based on her FB and IG she appeared to be a party girl who lacked a filter so, again she made choices which compromised how she appears to others. She did not use her platform and voice to educate, she consistently condemned others.

Your post provides the readers an opportunity to enhance their self-awareness however it does not give me pause to give Ms. Sacco a pass for her irresponsible behavior.

Regarding giving Ms. Sacco a “pass,” I am not advocating that. I hold her accountable for her words and actions, and I thought those were deplorable. But should we write her off as an evil human being, beyond redemption of any sort? Some of the tweets I’ve seen suggest that.

Regarding your statement that my mistakes were not of the same magnitude, I still have a hard time excusing myself for having committed them. I consider them to be epic failures. But perversely, having committed those epic failures has caused me to become a better person, colleague, and manager. Because of those epic failures, I reaped negative consequences. The negative consequences caused me to think about the impact my words and actions had on others, and about the kind of person I want to be in the world. I now operate much differently.

My post is really about whether we collectively think it’s possible that a person can change and grow – not just Ms. Sacco in particular – or whether they are who they seem to be at a moment in time. If we believe the former, then how do we best hold each other accountable for our mistakes, while at the same time holding open the possibility that we can learn from the negative consequences we reap and make positive changes in our lives?

Maryling, in the context you have described, maybe Ms. Sacco was unlucky in not getting enough feedback from her earlier stupid (and surprisingly unfunny) tweets to be able to learn and grow. Maybe she lacked a “filter” gene! But in the end she was the wrong person for the job, and she needed to be fired. Eventually, she will find the right job for her, where her past foolishness will be more or less irrelevant, and hopefully she will have learned something for the better.

Yes, I think you’ve hit the nail on the head that she would have benefited from negative feedback on her earlier tweets. Seeing yourself through the eyes of others is really one of the best tools for acquiring self-knowledge, and it has helped me greatly. I agree, she needed to be held accountable, and her employer held her accountable by firing her. Regardless of what she does going forward, I hope she goes through a deep introspective process regarding her epic fail. She’ll for sure acquire more of a filter going forward, but more than that, I hope she uncovers and roots out the sources of her alarming and disappointing attitudes and beliefs.

Classy response to a waste of space comment. I personally enjoyed reading the article and am of the same mindset that we are all one inappropriate comment away from having our lives ruined. Having said that, I am not a fan of the current trend of over sharing. People need to stop posting every stupid thing that comes to mind on tweeter or facebook.